


Walking on My Skin Again

by samalander



Category: Marvel (Movies), The Avengers (2012)
Genre: F/M, M/M, Multi, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-06
Updated: 2012-05-06
Packaged: 2017-11-04 21:53:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,480
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/398579
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/samalander/pseuds/samalander
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Three scenes in the unlikely relationship between Natasha, Clint and Phil. MAJOR MOVIE SPOILERS!</p>
            </blockquote>





	Walking on My Skin Again

1.  
Natasha started it. 

Phil has been debreifing the two of them for the better part of an hour about their mission to Bandar-Abbas and she's been antsy the whole time; pacing, fidgeting, barely sitting still. It's out of character for Nat, and it's making Clint feel like there are eyes all over him. (Which he realizes is silly because this is S.H.I.E.L.D. headquarters, there _are_ eyes everywhere. Of course there are. But these are bad eyes, and they make Clint feel like he needs approximately seven showers.)

Finally Coulson has enough of watching her pace, and he addresses it in the way he has - that ineffable way - by leaning forward and asking "Agent Romanov? Something you need to share?"

"Yes."

The men wait for her to continue, to say something more, but Natasha is far too Natasha to do that, and she settles into a chair to think, to consider her next words.

The seconds stretch to a minute, and Clint feels like the silence is pulling him taut.

"Nat?"

His voice breaks her spell, and she regards him with a look he's only seen her give to a few select targets and, one memorable time they had camped in an abandoned building for 15 days with nothing but bread and water, a McDonald's Cheeseburger.

"I think we should have sex."

Clint would be lying if he said he hadn't suspected this, hadn't seen it coming. The electricity between Nat and Phil has been building for weeks, years probably, and it's about time those two got it going.

Clint's jaw drops when Coulson nods. "What you and Agent Barton-"

"No," Natasha interrupts, curt and polite in equal measures, "We. Us. Three. You and me and you."

Clint doesn't expect that, but neither does Coulson, and the two men regard each other for a long moment before Phil shrugs. 

"What do you think, Barton?"

Well, fuck.

Isn't that always the way in S.H.I.E.L.D., though? "Stay here, Barton." "Get down from there, Barton!" "Threesome, Barton?"

Clint would be lying if he said he'd never considered it, sleeping with Nat or Phil, though he'd never put the two _together_ before - leave it to Nat - and now that it's been raised, he's finding it might be the perfect thing for all of them. He and Nat are partners, they're friends, they don't have the sexual chemistry, but neither of them has that connection with Coulson, who they're both attracted to. And so maybe, just maybe, putting the three unstable elements together will create something that can last.

Barton isn't a man of words, though, never has been. He's eyes and movement, and so instead of affirming, he stands, steps around the table to where Coulson is, and kisses his handler full on the mouth.

Phil leans into the kiss and when Clint pulls back, he notices three things: One, Nat looks like she wants to eat both of them alive and he finds that he's not exactly _against_ that idea. Two, Phil's eyes are fluttering open because he closed them when they kissed and there is a blush creeping up his ears that Clint thinks it might just be the most endearing thing Phil has ever done. Three, Clint has no idea how or why he is suddenly so turned on by the prospect of what they're about to do (though he has about forty theories, and most are highly improbable but only two are impossible) but he is painfully hard, just from a kiss, and when Natasha slinks around the table to join, straddling Coulson's lap backwards and pulling Clint's collar down so her mouth meets his, he thinks that it doesn't matter and for what might be the first time in his life, Clint Barton surrenders to the moment.

\---

Later they're sprawled under the table and Clint is wrapped around Phil who is wrapped around Natasha like a weird kind of sex-gyro (sex makes him so fucking hungry, that's _distracting_ and not conducive to metaphor) Clint spares a thought as to whether or not this is a thing now, a thing the three of them will be doing regularly and if so what it means for the chain of command and if it will hurt his partnership with Nat or strengthen it but Phil gives a little sigh and rolls onto his back, Nat's head pillowing on his shoulder in a halo of curls and Clint doesn't care if it never happens again, if neither of them ever speak to him, because he suddenly feels so full and happy in a way he's never felt without a bow in his hands.

And it doesn't stop. Maybe it's not a couple thing - or a threesome or whatever you want to call it - but Clint has two people who know him and care for him and _want_ him. And he wants them, and he cares about them, and so they fall into bed and they fight bad guys and if it's not perfect, it's pretty damn good.

\---

When they're in New Mexico, on the cold desert nights, Clint is bored out of his mind. They've had one night of excitement, the night when Clint's new best friend That Blond Guy Who Thinks He's A God broke in to get at the Hammer, but other than that, the nights are cold and long and boring.

Phil loves it, he loves how many stars you can see out here, and he tries to tell Clint about them, about Orion, the hunter, and his belt and bow. Clint listens, but he likes the way Phil's eyes glow more than he likes the star talk. Clint never wanted to be an astronaut, he never wanted to get away - he was away, too far away from home too often, and he doesn't understand that wandering need people like Nat and Phil get.

So one night when they're sharing a beer - no more than half for Clint, more than that and it makes his hands shake just that much and he can't shoot right for a week, he swears it's totally true - under the expansive canopy and Phil is talking about how Director Fury came to him and talked him out of flight training all those years ago, when S.H.I.E.L.D. was just a dream and Fury and Hill were looking for someone who would be a good man for them. And Phil doesn't regret it, not for a second.

And Clint kisses him, hard, chasing the bitter taste of hops across the other man's tongue.

There's no fire, though, not like it is when Natasha is there, not like the nights when the three of them roll and wrestle and laugh, and Nat performs acrobatic feats that make both of them go a little cross-eyed. It's nice, it's sweet, but when Clint pulls back, there's no blush on Phil's ears.

"We need her, don't we," Phil asks, and Clint nods.

"It's not that-"

"No."

It doesn't matter what Clint was going to say- that Phil was attractive to him, which he is or that he does care for Phil, which he does -because Clint has the feeling that Phil already knows. So they pass the beer back and forth a bit longer, and Clint asks some questions about Phil's family, his life before S.H.I.E.L.D., and they make up lies to tell Tony Stark, lies about Phil's life so Stark will never have to learn how mundane his really is, without a Natasha and a Clint there to be the rest of his whole.

2.  
Nat is sitting by Clint's bed when he wakes up, her brow creased, but otherwise unflinching. She is there and Phil isn't, and Clint knows what he did, remembers what Loki made him do, but he had always thought, or maybe believed, that nothing he could do would be bad enough for Phil to not care about him anymore.

His second thought is that Phil is probably just busy, just cleaning up the havock Clint's team wreaked on the base, just doing what he does, filling out paperwork and looking annoyed. Clint is sure that the moment he closes his eyes to rest, the moment he finds his feet, Phil will storm in, all bluster and foam, demanding to know what the holy hell Barton thought he was doing, being _compromised_ because really, who does that.

So Clint smiles at Nat and says, "I thought you were in Russia."

Nat doesn't cry or whine, and that's part of what Clint loves about her, the way she is just little boxes of emotion that she opens at will, and she says, "Coulson is down."

Clint blinks once, twice, three times. "No."

Nat just sighs and looks at him. "I'm sorry-"

But he never finds out what she's sorry for, because Steve Rogers - Captain FREAKING America, and god why isn't Phil here for THAT - slides into the room to talk to them, and their business has to wait.

_Life is what we have when we're not working_ , Phil told him once, when Clint asked about his future - did Phil want kids, did he want to retire to an artist colony in Pheonix? And if life was what he had when he wasn't working, Clint isn't sure Phil had lived a single day.

But he doesn't let himself react right now. Clint doesn't have time for life right now, no time to mourn. He just gets his bow, straps on his quiver, and if his hand rests on Nat's for a moment in the plane, she doesn't say anything. 

3.  
There's time to debrief again, but this time it's Hill, getting their reports about aliens and Loki and Stark and Clint barely knows what he's saying, but he knows with an ache of finality that if Hill is debriefing them, then Phil is gone.

He's still an agent, though, and so he bears the questioning and when she's done with him, he does what he's always done - he gets two cups of cocoa from the commissary and finds Nat.

She's sitting in the Containment Room, her legs hanging into the hole the Chamber left, staring at nothing. Wordlessly, he slips next to her and hands her the little paper cup.

"Who did your debrief?" she asks eventually, when the cocoa is nothing but cold sludge in the bottoms of their cups.

He crumples his cup up, sludge and paper, into a ball and takes his shot- it only gets halfway across the pit before it falls, endlessly, into the same abyss Thor fell through. Archer he is; basketball player, not so much.

"Hill," he tells her, as she traces the fall with her eyes. He thinks that a few weeks ago, she would have taken the shot, whipped out one of her pistols and fired at the trash. but she stretches instead, and he asks her, "Who did yours?"

"Weathers," she says, and he nods like he knows who that is. Truth be told, neither of them spends much time with the suits. That's part of what made Phil so remarkable.

They sit in silence, Clint's heels occasionally drumming against the wall, Natasha as still as the grave.

"This is where he died," she says, and Clint understands the rust-colored smear on the wall, across the chamber. No one has had time to clean it up yet, he guesses, and that makes him exactly as sad as it does angry, that Phil died at a time when there was no one available to mark the moment but Fury, when there was no time for Clint and Nat to be at his side and say their goodbyes.

"This is over, isn't it?" he asks, and Nat looks at him, really looks at him, for the first time since he handed her the cup.

"This?"

"Yeah." He motions between them. "This. Us."

"We're still partners."

He smiles sadly. His Nat, his best friend, and she's somehow so brilliant at everything except him.

"We'll always be partners," he says. "But without Phil-"

"Oh, that. The sex. Yeah," she smiles sadly, and Clint thinks for a second that she might cry, but at the end of that second she is Natasha Romanov, and she remains stoic. Later she'll shoot something, or maybe she already did, when they were fighting the aliens, but she doesn't express sadness in anything less than projectiles. "That's over."

Clint thinks about kissing her, about trying to convince her to keep it going for the memory of Phil, but he values his kneecaps and her choice too highly to pull that shit. 

He wishes he knew what to say, the magic words that would make this all okay, that would prove to both of them that they were still a team, but he comes up empty. He's never been a man of words.

"Nat-"

She puts a hand on his cheek, and he knows there are a thousand things she isn't saying. he slings an arm around her shoulder, and she does the closest thing to snuggling she's ever done with him - she doesn't remove it.

"I miss him too," he says, finally, and her shoulder shakes almost imperceptibly. He drops his arm, and she looks at him in askance.

"Remember," he says, "after Tokyo, two years ago? When I thought we were both going to be discharged?"

Natasha might smile, but he's not looking at her. His eyes are a little glued to the copper streak on the wall.

"Yes," she says, "and Phil gave us that awful chocolate cake."

"Because he said the debriefing was going to suck-"

"And we should have something good, even though it wasn't. And then he yelled at us."

"He yelled at me-"

"At _us_ , Clint. For forty minutes, just yelling in that way of his, like he was so mad, but he never raised his voice and he was still yelling?"

Clint laughs, the memory of Phil's searing, quiet anger warming him somehow. And how, when Phil was done yelling, he had sat down, grabbed Natasha's fork, and somehow fit a small boulder of cake into his mouth.

_"Don't ever make me yell at you two like that again," Phil had growled, chocolate crumbs dusting his lips. "And next time, tell me when the cake sucks."_

Clint's hand finds Nat's on the floor, and he gives her fingers a squeeze before he stands. "I," he says, rolling his left shoulder, which was strained in the attack, "need a long shower."

She smiles up at him, one of her beautiful, rare smiles, and he files it away in his mind for a rainy day, or the next time he thinks about Phil, and leaves Nat sitting there, staring into nothing.

They're going to be okay, he thinks, just, not quite yet.

**Author's Note:**

> I walked out of the movie and into this fic. I'm not sure I even ship it, but I needed to write this.  
> Title from the Counting Crows' "When I Dream Of Michelangelo"


End file.
